I work in the mobile group at Walmart Labs, and we are a bridge between the world of eCommerce and brick and mortar stores. As such, we have systems running all the way into the stores themselves.
There was a sobering reminder of how our technology is trying to serve people. It is so easy to get into your work and be thinking about programming languages and architecture and mobile phones.
When you are thinking about the bits you aren’t thinking about the blood flowing through the people that you are trying to empower.
One of our monitoring systems starting alerting us to a problem in systems in an Oklahoma Walmart store. While looking to hunt down the problem (we assumed it was some network issue, or software bug, or the like) we eventually found the source of the “bug” in the news.
A tornado went through towns in Oklahoma causing much destruction to peoples lives.
This was a dark day for the large number of people who are affected by this devastation, and since we are all connected, all of us.
My heart goes out to everyone.
When I look at our dashboard and see a blip, I have a feeling my heart will jump a little, and I won’t jump to any assumptions.
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